We continue listing the best practice from storage engineering:

9. Data flow – Data flows into stores and stores grow by size. Businesses and applications that generate data often find the data to be sticky once it accumulates. Consequently a lot of attention is paid to early estimation of size and the kind of treatment to take. 

10. Distributed activity – File systems and object storage have to take advantage of horizontal scalability with the help of clusters and nodes. Consequently, the use of distributed processing such as with Paxos algorithm becomes useful to take advantage of this strategy. Partitioning becomes useful in isolating activities. 

11. Protocols – Nothing facilitates communication between peers or master-slave as a protocol. Even a description of the payload and generic operations of create, update, list and delete become sufficient to handle storage relevant operations at all levels.  

12. Layering – Finally storage solutions have taught us that appliances can be stacked, services can be hierarchical and data may be tiered. Problem solved in one domain with a particular solution may be equally applicable to similar problem in different domain. This means that we can use layers for the overall solution 

13. Virtualization – Cloud computing has taught us the benefit of virtualization at all levels where different entities may be spanned with a universal access pattern. Storage is no exception and every storage product tends to take advantage of this strategy. 

14. Security and compliance – Every regulatory agency around the globe look for some kind of certification. Most storage providers have to demonstrate compliance with one or more of the following: PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH,  FedRAMP,  EU Data Protection Directive, FISMA and such others. Security is provided with the help of identity and access management and they come in useful to secure individual storage artifacts